Trap Avoided

Cryptic rumbles from the stove-heated conference tent at Panmunjom had U.N. correspondents baffled--and, for that matter, just about everybody else. As far as the newsmen could make out from the word given by the briefing officer, the U.N. subcommitteemen and their Communist opposite numbers had almost agreed on item 2 of the agenda, the ceasefire line.* There only remained to be settled, it seemed, the relatively minor question of who, if anybody, would hold Kaesong. What, then, was aU the scuffling about in the conference tent? At week's end Vice Admiral Charles Turner Joy, chief of the U.N. truce delegation, boarded the press train parked at Munsan and explained to the puzzled newsmen, and suddenly everything was as clear as day.

Sarcastic Phrase. The U.N. team had discovered and avoided a neat Communist deadfall--rigged up by the Reds perhaps as long ago as last July, when the truce agenda was adopted. At that time the enemy had insisted that the cease-fire line be dealt with first. Hoping for a quick armistice, the U.N. had agreed. There followed months of bickering, deadlocks, interruptions, neutral zone problems and false Red accusations. Thus it seemed a U.N. triumph, and a hastening of peace, when the Reds gave up their insistence on the 38th parallel line, and accepted instead the present battle line. Some military bigwigs talked as if peace was just around the corner. But last week the Reds' seeming compliance with Matt Ridgway's demands was spotted as a trap which would bottle up U.N. military strength behind a fixed demarcation line, while the other agenda items were wrangled over endlessly.

The U.N. team had a sarcastic phrase for what the Reds were trying to get without paying for it: a "de facto ceasefire."

Parliamentary Point. Said Admiral Joy: "He [the enemy] wants all the advantages of a de facto cease-fire so that he can prolong the armistice negotiations without cost to himself. He wants immediate relief from our inexorable military pressure--the pressure which would be an 'incentive' to arrive quickly at agreement on other items."

Having discovered this, the U.N. took the obvious course of insisting that the demarcation line would not be finally fixed until the other agenda items had been negotiated and disposed of. The Reds screamed foul; the U.N. proposal, they said, was not "in accordance with the letter of the agenda." The Red charge was true in a formal sense; item 2 should have been settled ahead of item 3. But the U.N. delegates, who consider themselves honest, hard-nosed military men and not tricky lawyers, were unmoved by the Red complaints. Said one delegate: "These people are still our enemies. We are not going to be trapped by a parliamentary point of order."

Belated but commendable vigilance had saved the U.N. from a possibly grave setback. But vigilance alone was not going to get peace in Korea; it remained to be seen whether steady military pressure, without a full-scale offensive, would do it.

*Item i was the adoption of the agenda and the agreement to discuss it. Items 3, 4 and 5 concern supervision of arrangements after a truce is signed (TIME, Nov. 12), exchange of prisoners and recommendations (not binding) to the belligerent governments.

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